A French figure of experimental music from the 1970s, singer Catherine Ribeiro died during the night of Thursday 22 to Friday 23 August 2024 at the age of 82, in a retirement home in Martigues, her entourage announced to AFP on Friday.
After starting out as an actress, this committed artist, free spirit, rebellious and uncompromising, navigated during her career between progressive rock and French song, enjoying great success without ever looking towards show business.
Born on September 22, 1941 in Lyon, the daughter of Portuguese immigrants, Catherine Ribeiro began her career as an actress. She notably played alongside filmmaker Jean-Luc Godard in the film The Carabinieri (1963).
She then recorded a few songs with Barclay, which earned her a place in the legendary photo of the yéyé stars taken in April 1966 by Jean-Marie Périer for the newspaper Hello Friends. But she will choose a different path than that of a youth idol.
Because in the meantime, in December 1962, on the set of Carabinieri of Godard, she met the composer and experimental musician Patrice Moullet. Not enough to save her from her demons at the time of going through a phase of doubt, marked by a violent mother, eaten away by a feeling of failure. After a suicide attempt in April 1968, Catherine Ribeiro spent many weeks in hospital and had to “relearn to speak, to walk, to write”she will confide to Release in February 2013. In 1969, with Patrice Moullet, she founded and led the group that would soon be called Alpes. Her companion composes and plays instruments that he invented, the cosmophone (an electroacoustic instrument) and the percuphone. Ribeiro writes the lyrics.
Their first album does not yet bear the name Alpes, but is called Catherine Ribeiro + 2 tonamed after the address of the studio where they rehearse, at 2 bis quai du Port, in Nogent-sur-Marne, where the couple also frequented the first hippie community in France. “You have to know that no record company wanted a group name at the time”explained Catherine Ribeiro to Release to justify the promotion of his name alone. They will have to resolve to rename themselves after police visits to the community where drugs are circulating. “Alpes has established itself: to admire the summit of a mountain, you have to look up, it’s sunny.”
Their unclassifiable group could have remained confidential, but their participation in the Aix-en-Provence pop festival in 1970 brought them an unexpected spotlight and a whole new notoriety.
“We lit our shows exclusively with candles until 1974.Catherine Ribeiro told Release. It gave a fragile and soothing light. Without a draft, the candles lasted an hour and a half. Otherwise, we ended up in the shadows.” More than once, the singer fears seeing her long black hair catch fire on stage…
Alpes is shunned by the mainstream media who are wary of Ribeiro’s subversive and libertarian lyrics. Even their record company Philips does not take responsibility, forcing the group to mention “The lyrics of these songs are the sole responsibility of their author” on album covers Peace et Standing soulthe singer remembered bitterly. “It’s terrible that you did that to me.”
Then the stage will be their field of expression, without hindrance. Alpes fills the rooms. With her deep, serious, poignant voice, Catherine Ribeiro delivers her indignation and her demands, as in the song All rights are in nature, whose performance was immortalized during one of their rare television appearances.
Until 1982, the Alpes group recorded around ten albums, including Peace (1972), considered their most accomplished and accessible album, and gave hundreds of concerts. In the meantime, Ribeiro and Moullet separated, but they continued to make music together. In the 1980s, the singer moved to the Ardennes.
Alongside her musical career, Catherine Ribeiro, a humanist artist, is fervently committed to multiple causes: Palestine, refugees fleeing the military dictatorship in Chile, those escaping Francoism in Spain…
The “priestess of French song” supports the anarchist movement, which earns her another nickname, that of “red pasionaria”. But she does not adhere to any party, preferring Buddhism to political activism.
In 1977, Catherine Ribeiro took part in the first edition of the Printemps de Bourges. Five years later, in May 1982, she performed for three weeks at Bobino. Among her admirers in the audience, President François Mitterrand slipped in. Ribeiro, however, declined a series of fifteen dates at the Olympia to protect her vocal cords from a high volume of sound that she did not think she could handle over time. In parallel with her career with Alpes, Ribeiro released a tribute album to Édith Piaf in 1977, Piaf’s Bluesdistinguished by the Grand Prix of the Charles-Cros Academy, then a disc dedicated to Jacques Prévert, Jacqueriesin 1978.
In 1992, the singer once again celebrated the great names of French song at the Châtelet auditorium, a concert immortalized by a live album, Love in the nudeThe following year, after a stint at the Francofolies, she recorded her last studio album, Burning window. A few years later, Ribeiro and Moullet reformed Alpes with a new line-up, but the project of releasing an album did not come to fruition. In January 2008, Catherine Ribeiro sang in a packed Bataclan. Before that, a concert in Palaiseau, in the Paris region, gave rise to a final live album.
In the 2010s, Catherine Ribeiro left Sedan and settled in Germany. In October 2017, joining the #metoo movement to speak out against sexual violence, she spoke out on Facebook and accused a man from a radio and television station of assaulting her, recalled France Inter. “I was raped in 1962 and I kept quiet. If I had spoken, this man would have been able to sue me (…). I didn’t use the word RAPE until I was 60. For me, until his death and after: the disgust, the shame, the repulsion and later, the anger are always present.”
In recent years, Catherine Ribeiro had distanced herself from public life, becoming elusive, only responding to the media by telephone. In May 2013, interviewed by The Point on her eclipse, she had answered: “I know, it’s mind-blowing for someone who has performed at the Fête de l’Humanité six times in front of 120,000 people, but walking in the city scares me.” She was then working on writing an autobiography. She had already told her story through a book, Childhoodpublished in 1999 by L’Archipel, now out of print.
In the mid-2000s, nine albums by the group Alpes were reissued in a box set. A great opportunity to (re)discover an ardent and rebellious artist.